Methodists were left alone, as a denomination, to their religious scruples and their obstinate opposition to the system.

And alas! they too gave way to the tide of common feeling and selfishness. The laws had effectually restrained all disciplinary regulations on the subject, and very soon members of the Church and ministers of the Church were found, not only holding slaves, but buying and selling them as mere property and articles of common traffic. Still, however, conscience was wakeful and clamorous. The light which had been so long shed on the sin and great evil of slavery by the early Methodist preachers in the South, as well as in the North, could not be immediately extinguished, and the twinges of conscience were at times intolerable. It was necessary, therefore, to look about for an anodyne-some "sweet oblivious antidote,”—and it was found in the "Scriptural arguments in favour of slavery," which have been so zealously urged, and generally believed, by those whose interests and conveniences plead hard for accommodation, and afford a ready inlet to the consolatory doctrine. And now we have Methodist slave-traders, as well as Methodist slave-holders. The followers of Wesley buying slaves at auction, to sell again in a distant and higher market, without regard to family ties or conjugal relations! Some of the travelling preachers themselves have inherited slaves, or acquired them by marriage, and with the slaves got plantations too, and while they travel abroad, preaching as the rule of life, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," their slaves are consigned to the tender mercies of an overseer," that is, a mercenary slave-driver, who, from the very nature of his service, soon ceases to feel towards slaves as human beings. The preacher teaches the people still, that "love worketh no ill to its neighbour," but they have a right to infer from his example, that it does not forbid them to deprive their neighbour (if he be black or yellow) of all personal rights, to reduce him to a state of the utmost degradation, to subject him to the absolute will of his master or his agent, in respect to both temporal and eternal interests. O Lord! how long! how long!

This was the state of things in the South when the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church assembled in New-York, in May, 1844. What then took place, and the results of the action of that body, we must reserve for notice in a future number of the Quarterly.

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ART. IX-RELIGIOUS TRAINING.

THERE is not in the wide world a living thing more helpless and unpromising than man in his infancy. He is feeble and dependent beyond any other animal, and for a much longer period. He is utterly unable to perform any good offices for himself. He cannot defend himself against the most insignificant enemy, or the most inconsiderable danger. He must inevitably perish, upon whatever spot his frail body may happen to repose, unless some careful hand feed, protect, and cherish him. Of the tact and skill which are to form the endowment of riper years he does not now manifest the faintest trait. He is even less gifted than brutes of his own age with the instincts which, in the absence of a higher intelligence, guide every other living creature. He breathes, utters some inarticulate sounds, swallows the simple food that is put into his mouth, and makes some unmeaning muscular movements, and that is all he can do to announce to the spectator that this embryo immortal possesses even the lowest of the attributes of things that live.

Such is man, physically, at his entrance upon a career in which he is appointed to act so important a part, and fulfil so unfathomable a destiny. Nor of the higher faculties which he is to develop and exercise in after life does the slightest glimmering now appear. He exhibits nothing like character, whether good or evil. He has no reason, no conscience, no moral or immoral habits, no religion, no opinions, no ideas. His mind is a blank. His heart is a mere organ for the performance of an animal function.

Yet is there something wonderful and even sublime in this embryo man. He may become a hero, a philosopher, or a saint,-a scourge, or a benefactor of his race. He is likely to become an active and competent agent in human affairs and to perform a part in the drama of the world; and he will assuredly become a partaker either of endless life, or of eternal death. Great faculties lie concealed under such unpromising aspects. They are seen by the eyes of God; "yet being unperfect, in his book are they written; they are fashioned in continuance, when as yet there is none of them." They are not substances nor powers, but merely susceptibilities. To develop these latent capacities, to bring them out for action and enjoyment, to transform this helpless, insignificant thing into a good and wise man, fitted to serve God and his generation on earth, and to enjoy him forever in heaven, is the work of education. This is a

task it has pleased God to devolve upon parents, and to it they are bound by obligations as sacred as any that rest upon a moral being.

The duty of bestowing careful, timely culture upon infancy and childhood, is clearly indicated by their exceeding delicacy and susceptibility. Physical developments will indeed proceed very well with only the slightest attention on the part of the parent, or with none at all. The nursery, the play-ground, the field, and the workshop, invite the bodily organs into due action, and impart vigour, skill, and activity. The intellect, too, however neglected by the teacher, imbibes knowledge from a thousand sources. Each of the senses becomes an inlet for valuable ideas. Business, social converse, human example, even inanimate nature, the sky, the air, and the earth, the elements in all their changes and activities, the vegetable kingdom,-in a word, the visible world, and all that is, or is transacted, in it, become sources of instruction, which freely tender their lessons to the opening mind in contact with them, and force their teachings upon it, in its most passive states, and even in spite of indifference or reluctance. From all this it occurs, that every human being who grows up in a civilized community attains a measure of intelligence sufficient for the common purposes of life,—of the intelligence that guides the race in the satisfaction of its most pressing wants, and which must, on that account, rank high in comparison with that class of acquisition and accomplishments which we are wont to dignify with the name of education. Divine Providence has thus mercifully ensured to the human being such degrees of physical and mental development as are indispensable in the performance of those functions which pertain to self-preservation, and on which society is dependent for its being and material prosperity. For the higher culture, which gives the mind enlargement, and elevation, and refinement, and opens before it a career of worthy occupations and enjoyments, years of patient labour and assiduous teaching are requisite; and parents are, unquestionably, bound by all the motives which duty and affection impose, to give to their offspring the best education which their providential positions and circumstances will allow. Without stopping to enforce, by argument or inculcation, one of the plainest and least controverted of duties, we proceed to add, that the highest of the parent's obligations finds its sphere in the moral and religious training of his offspring. The superior importance of this department of education is sufficiently apparent, from the consideration already suggested, that whilst both the mind and the body, left to themselves, and wholly neglected by parent and teacher, spontaneously acquire, from their own activity, and from the business and conflicts of the world, the discipline,

as well as the knowledge and skill, most valuable in the pursuits of after life,—the moral susceptibilities, if neglected, are always perverted and corrupted. The most careful and unremitted culture is requisite to preserve them from the most irreclaimable deterioration. They come to no good by any spontaneous, unguided efforts or essays of their own,-they will not remain in a state of embryo or torpor, till genial influences and a plastic hand woo and guide them into kindly manifestations. To let the child alone, is to ensure both precocity and proficiency in evil. It affords demonstrative evidence of the constitutional depravity of man, as well as of its universality, that early childhood ever betrays a strong proclivity to wrong, that it never fails of growing up in sin, except under decided counteracting influences.

This susceptibility to both moral and to demoralizing influences exists to an extent, and at an age, little suspected by inattentive observers. We give no countenance to the extravagant speculations of those who teach us that the character of the man, both moral and mental, is fixed in infancy, even anterior to the clear dawn of reason; but we think it demonstrable that the bias which shapes our earthly and eternal destinies is usually received in early childhood. This is the obvious teaching of the Holy Scriptures; and all careful observation goes to confirm it. The mind at that early period is exquisitely susceptible to moral impressions. The delicate surfaces on which the daguerreotype so exactly portrays the human countenance, with no pencil or colours but reflected sunbeams, are not half so impressible as the unsophisticated spirit of childhood. The mind at that tender age is not only open to all influences, good and bad, but it spontaneously invites them to write upon its expanding capacities their own image and superscription. It longs for impressions, as the parched cornfield for genial showers. It spreads out its tender leaves to receive them, as the green plant to the dews of heaven. As some flowers follow the sun through all his circuit, and open their gay bosom full upon his glowing, rolling orb, all day long, from morn to noon, from noon to night, so are infancy and childhood irresistibly drawn within the sphere of incessantly active influences, which must go far to fashion their manhood, and impress upon them forms of moral dignity or degradation, which will endure, ineffaceable, through eternity.

This extreme susceptibility of opening life, and its active, urgent tendency to put on the attributes of a moral character, are what demands our most profound solicitude. So strong, especially, is the tendency to evil, that could we isolate a child so completely as to exclude all external influences whatever, whether of circumstances

or direct teaching, we might yet calculate, with all certainty, that his heart would become embittered, and his life deformed, by sinful feelings and vicious habits. His own unsatisfied desires would awaken discontent. The restraints imposed by the laws and conditions of his being would generate repining and resentment. Appetite would become wanton, from licentious indulgence; whilst pride and self-conceit would speedily shoot forth into a rank luxuriance, in the absence of sober counsels and of the fear of God. Still more would there be, of necessity, an utter want of any right religious sentiments,—of reverence, and gratitude, and dutifulness towards God, and of charity and justice to men. These results,—and they together constitute a character of decided immorality and irreligion, -are clearly natural and unavoidable, under the circumstances supposed. They come of themselves, spontaneously, at no man's bidding, and can only be prevented by positive, ameliorating, and counteracting efforts. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, that the development of right moral and religious character is wholly the work of education and religious nurture: meaning, by these terms, not the training of the parent and the teacher only, but also the agency of circumstances, whilst the force of example and association alone, independent of all direct inculcation, is sufficient to impress upon the child's plastic nature any form of vice and ungodliness. Let him grow up amongst idolaters, and that circumstance ensures his being a devotee to false gods, and the deadly foe of all true piety and virtue. Life amongst the Feejees would infallibly convert the child of Christian parents into a cannibal. Give your babe to be nursed and trained in an infidel family, and he will, without some strong remedial or preventing influence from better sources, grow up to be an enemy and a contemner of Christ. Nurtured in a den of thieves, or smugglers, or robbers, he will feel neither horror nor disapprobation of the atrocious crimes with which he is constantly familiar; and to become the most daring and expert of the gang will, in all probability, be the highest aspiration ever felt by his blighted spirit. Without going beyond the limits of our own neighbourhood, or perhaps ten yards from the door of the church where we pay our adoration to God, we may find scores of vile, hardened boys, with whom we could not allow our child habitually to play in the streets, without a feeling of certainty that he would become, like them, a reckless vagrant, upon whom all Christian efforts must be probably unavailing,—with regard to whom we never think, when we think of them as having souls, without feeling a shudder of despair.

Such is the susceptibility of the young mind to evil impressions; and it inculcates a Christian lesson upon all parents who have hearts,